The present invention relates to a new and improved method of fabricating a printing block and also pertains to printing blocks produced according to such method and the use thereof.
In order to fabricate a printing block for intaglio printing there are known to the art many different techniques, such as for instance woodcuts, etching, lithography, aquatint, engraving, direct etching, heliography and many others. These techniques can be classified into two groups. The one group encompasses those techniques wherein the artisan is concerned with the material of the printing block. The material of the printing block therefore is manually worked in some manner by the artisan. A print or copy produced with such printing block is generally designated as original graphics. The techniques of the other group contain photographic working steps. The prints obtained with such type fabricated block are designated as reproductions.
This subdivision of the most different technology into two groups in reality constitutes an over simplification since there are also different techniques which are closer to the one or the other of the two groups, but nonetheless they cannot be completely properly classified in one or the other of such groups.
The original graphics, also known as artistic printing graphics, are mostly used for printing smaller circulations, for so-called fine art sheets, wherein the prints are also generally produced at a hand-operated press. The highest requirements are placed upon such prints since they should not only constitute information, but rather also reproduce the handwriting of the artisan as faithfully as possible. The situation is different in the case of a reproduction which must be reproduced in large series only for information purposes, however not for any artistic value.
The requirements placed upon obtaining as good as possible print are that such be as true or faithfully to the original as possible. By means of the present day conventional photographic techniques for the fabrication of reproductions it is possible to obtain very good reproductions of an original, but nonetheless what is missing from such reproduction is the application of an ink or color and therefore possesses an inherent surface structure, i.e. also a depth extension of the image or picture, in other words a spatial graining.
In order at the present time to be able to produce prints of such quality, in other words original prints, a great expenditure is required until the printing block is completed. For the printing block there can be used the most different materials, such as for example wood, zinc, lead, stone, steel, copper and so forth. The picture to be obtained can be formed by carving or cutting out, incising or cutting-in, engraving, scraping away and by further manual material-removing or material-displacing work. This work can be further supplemented by a chemical operation through etching. In order to obtain as fine as possible depth gradation, it is also possible to supplement this manual work, which has been amplified by a chemical working operation, still with photographic working steps, such as, for instance, in the case of heliography. With this very consuming technique it is possible to obtain a very fine depth gradation of the image or picture to be obtained; hence the artisan has great possibilities of imparting to the image or picture to be produced his artistic expression. It should be apparent that this technique is very complicated and hence correspondingly expensive.